‘Geo-politics’ dominates World Economic Forum

The topic of ‘geo-politics’ has dominated the Twitter accounts of World Economic Forum (WEF) participants attending this year’s Annual Meeting taking place in Davos, Switzerland from 17-20 January 2017.

Mentions of ‘Trump’, ‘Brexit’ and ‘Elections’ were among the top keywords driving this geo-political conversation by those registered to attend the event thus far. 2017 WEF participants have published more than 108,000 tweets over the past 4 months.

KPMG International’s WEFLIVE.com platform monitors and visualizes the Twitter conversation among World Economic Forum attendees. ‘Trends’ indicates the keywords being discussed on Twitter, with size demonstrating frequency of use. ‘Participants’ indicates those who have received the most engagement and reach on their tweets. (CNW Group/KPMG International)
This activity also suggests that the theme of the 2017 event, “Responsive and Responsible Leadership”, resonates well with WEF attendees, clearly voicing their sentiments as they relate to political leadership and the rise of populism throughout the globe.

Outside of the political realm, discussions on the topic of ‘women’ also surfaced to the top of participant Twitter activity, with content highlighting important issues around workplace inequality, as well as those related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the impact of things such as safe drinking water on the lives of the world’s most vulnerable women.

The analysis was conducted by KPMG International using their award-winning WEFLIVE.com platform, which monitors and visualizes the Twitter conversation taking place from Davos attendees using interactive and live infographics, heat maps, influencer rankings and lists of tweets.

Of those WEF participants registered for Davos 2017, singer, songwriter and education advocate Shakira (@Shakira), who will be receiving an award at Davos for her leadership in improving the state of the world, tops the list of the most influential WEF participant on Twitter. Bill Gates (@BillGates), co-founder of Microsoft and devoted philanthropist, and Cory Doctorow (@doctorow), Canadian-British blogger, journalist and science fiction author, ranked second and third respectively.

In terms of the location of the Twitter engagements (retweets, replies and likes) of the participants’ tweets, the US, the UK, India and Mexico were the top four contributing countries, suggesting that these locations are most affected by current geo-political topics.